New foods: Your foreign spouse, no matter how cooking illiterate he or she may be, will introduce you to new foods. Mayonnaise and mushrooms are not to be ignored in Russian culture. Israelis take salad to the next level. Kazakhstanis eat horse. Um, not really my cup of tea. Nope, I haven’t been married a few times. I got a man of the world.

Language: A category with subcategories:

Communication disconnects: Because really, do you always WANT to know what your spouse is saying? And visa versa. Plus, what’s funnier than a good old malapropism? That’s when somebody phrases something incorrectly, uses a word in the wrong context, or just jumbles it completely. HAHA!

Tuning out during a long, loud family debate about something, probably politics. So relaxing.

Throwing out a foreign word here and there with your kid so you don’t sound like a jerk in public. At least with the English speaking crowd.

Travel: Friend, have you ever played ping pong at your spouse’s childhood pioneer camp in Almaty, Kazakhstan and then hung out in his former gym teacher’s room?

Perspective: Bitching about your small apartment? Imagine growing up in your Soviet living room. Eh, maybe that 1000 square feet ain’t so bad. Got an ex-military spouse? Chances are his expectations aren’t too high in the cooking department. “You made schnitzel? Oh you’re the best wife ever!” OKAY …

New traditions: Such as incessant gifting. Okay, that gets old. Particularly when you are the gifter not the giftee.

Exposure to new cultures, history, and a parts of the world you grow to care about. Or not.

Loving your country: looking at where you live from a different angle. And realizing it’s pretty great. Not perfect by far, but not too shabby.

Sharing a cool love story: Knowing you’re probably the one and only girl from Westborough, Massachusetts, USA who ever went to the Beit She’an Valley in Israel and met some guy from Almaty, Kazakhstan who happened to have had CNN and working air conditioning at just the right time to watch the presidential recount in the year 2000 during the start of the Second Intifada which is also when the USS Cole was blown up in Yemen – and then one day you’d live in Boston and name your daughter Liron and revel in the pleasures of a boring Saturday night at home just lucky enough to lay on the couch watching a movie, falling asleep 15 minutes in.